Regurgitated Reminders

TidBITS Talk
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About a month ago, I updated my iPad Pro M4 and iPhone 13 Pro from iOS/iPadOS 17 to 18.1.1. Last night on my iPad I was investigating the new feature that adds reminders with a date and time to the Calendar app. Great idea, but in typical Apple fashion the implementation leaves something to be desired. Namely, that it works.

There in my iPad’s calendar were reminders that had been completed ages ago. I puzzled over this for a while, and then decided that I could go into the Reminders app and delete completed reminders, since I never review them. I had over 5,000 completed reminders, which I cleared, to use the app’s terminology. This worked around the problem and my calendar now showed only active reminders, though obviously having to take the step of clearing completed reminders each time I actually complete one - so that it doesn’t continue to appear on my calendar - is not something I look forward to.

I then noticed, still on my iPad, that the Reminders app was prompting me to do an update. I had ignored this previously. It says “To use all the latest features, tap update.” So I did. The gear spun for at least five minutes, then stopped, with no apparent change. Then the update request reappeared. A few minutes later, I tried again. This time, with the gear spinning, many completed reminders reappeared in my Today view and, correspondingly, in other views. I went to look at completed reminders, which had been at zero after clearing them earlier, and there were over 4,000.

The gear kept spinning with no other noticeable change. After a half hour, the gear was still spinning. I force quit the Reminders app and restarted it. Still spinning. Still showing completed reminders. I closed the cover of my iPad and went to bed. This morning, the gear had stopped, the regurgitated reminders were gone, and the request to update the app reappeared.

However, the completed apps are still in the Completed list and have now reappeared in the Calendar app.

So, I have some questions. Why does the Reminders app want me to do an update outside of an OS update? What features is it supposed to add? Why is it refusing to update? Why is the update at least temporarily restoring completed reminders and why did my cleared reminders return to the Completed list? Why are completed reminders showing up in the Calendar app?

(A quick search of the Apple Support Community shows someone having this problem of regurgitated reminders in iOS 17 and another person on, wait for it, MacOS 10.4! Obviously a long-standing bug that Apple doesn’t deign to fix. But we have Genmoji!)

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In IOS 18.2 and iPadOS 18.2, completed reminders are shown in the calendar in light grey type, as opposed to black for active reminders. In MacOS 15.2, you have the option to show or hide completed reminders in the Calendars>View menu.

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There was an update to Reminders back in iOS 13 and macOS Catalina. It wasn’t required to update if, for example, you had a mobile device on a higher version of iOS or iPadOS and an older MacOS than Catalina - I was prompted on all of my devices when those upgrades happened (I remember that I chose not to update at least on of my Macs so it wouldn’t have reminders at all; I rarely use them on my Mac anyway - 99% of the time I am using them on my phone, and most of the other 1% is on my iPad.)

I just have scheduled reminders in Calendar on my Mac (which, again, I tend to ignore anyway), on the dates that the Reminders are/were scheduled to be completed.

Well, one can only guess, but it seems most likely that the Reminders that you had removed on one device had not synced to the new device before you told it to update and when the device updated and there were all of these Reminders that didn’t exist on the sync server and they were synced back up to iCloud again.

Of course you didn’t know at the time, but I am sure that it would have worked much better for you if you had been prompted for the update first on the iPad and then deleted all of the Reminders.

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Thanks, Alan. I’m looking at my iPad in Day view with three panels. On the left, the panel headed Calendars, there’s a switch for Show Completed Reminders. It is turned off. In the middle panel, showing today’s calendar, the regurgitated completed reminders are visible. Turning the switch on and off makes no change.

Remember that these regurgitated reminders are no longer showing in my Reminders app; they disappeared when the app finally gave up on trying to update itself.

To make things more confusing, I find that the Show Completed Reminders switch DOES work for reminders that I am actively using. For example, I have a reminder scheduled for later today. If I complete it, it disappears from the list. If I turn Show Completed Reminders on, it appears in gray. Flip the switch again, it disappears.

So the switch is ignored by the regurgitated reminders but not current reminders.

On my iPhone, in Day view, the regurgitated reminders are NOT showing at all.

My Mac is still on Sonoma, so it is mercifully insulated from all this.

Continuing: On my iPad, I deleted all completed reminders. Returning to the Calendar app, the regurgitated reminders are still there. Went to my iPhone. The deletion of reminders did not propagate to the phone, even after a force quit and restart. No doubt it would eventually, but I manually cleared the deleted reminders there. That did not change the iPad calendar, as it had done previously. I’ll give it some time.

Bottom line, I’m not going to spend much more time on this. I already use Todoist and have it integrated with my Calendar app. There’s already overlapping functionality between it and Reminders. I’ll just stop using Reminders and turn off the integration with Calendar. Actually, this will simplify my life.

PS Thanks for reading all this. BTW, you have your 15s and 18s reversed in your post.

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Thanks, Doug. If you care to, you can read my reply to @aforkosh. Bottom line that I mentioned there, I already use Todoist, and I’m just going to stop using Apple’s buggy Reminders app.

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Fixed.

Thanks.

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Just another thought: Reminders and events in general are data kept in a database. When the new feature to add a date and time to a reminder was implemented, it was a change in the database structure. To implement it “cleanly,” all of the existing records in the database had to be altered to include the new fields for reminder date and time.

For someone who uses Reminders lightly, that might be an operation that takes at most a few minutes and would be invisible to the user. For you, with at least 5,000 completed Reminders in the tank, that would be a much longer operation, especially if the coders wanted to be sure that integrity of those records was preserved.

That would explain all of the behaviors you saw, including the spinning gear and the ultimate “clearing” of your past Reminders once again. They didn’t actually clear; they were simply put out of sight once again.

This is so consonant with Apple’s approach to other update situations. Spotlight, the file-system-level search utility, is famous for this kind of thing after an OS update.

Other apps do it, but are much more transparent about what they are doing and why they are doing it. Evernote, as one example, will add features that require updating the database structure and existing records. But they put up a dialog that informs the user, politely, that “Your notes are being updated to be used with the new version. Please wait.”

Apple may have reasons for not wanting to do that, or they may not test against cases like yours. But (and again, this is my reverse-engineering mindset and not informed by actual knowledge!) they are likely presuming that this is all part of the upgrade experience, and that users should “just know” that it will take their systems a while to stabilize after an update.

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Thanks, Matt. I agree with what you say, that there is some change going on to whatever data structure holds the data. However, processing some 5,000 records shouldn’t take a half-hour on an M4 iPad. And it should not fail (as it repeatedly has) without giving an error message, even the typically useless “Something went wrong. Try again later.”

It’s now more than a full day later since I did anything to the Reminders app on my iPad. It is still prompting me to Update, even though I’ve attempted this at least three times. Any update process should have finished long ago. There’s some problem with the software, and I’m not going to waste any more of my time on it.

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Sure don’t blame you for that decision!

It reminds me that recently the App Store was bugging me about iPhoto being incompatible with the current version of iOS and I needed to talk with the app developer to get a working version. I thought iPhoto had long since been removed from my phone, but finally went looking and sure enough the little bugger was still there!

Waste of energy on something I don’t use any more.

(One final thought: you don’t mention deleting and reinstalling Reminders—and why would you?—but it’s occasionally helped me with misbehaving apps to get them and their corrupted data off the device, then reinstall and resync them.)